WARNING : for any seeking recovery or any info on beneficial mental health practices , I do not have any formal education on this subject and in fact have no college education at all .
I personally was in the Scientology cult for twenty five years and have written over five hundred posts on that at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology.
I often describe Scientology as 1984 on acid. It is incredibly bizarre and has been called the cult of cults. Part of the reason for this is that Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard plagiarized hundreds of ideas from the occult, hypnotism, and virtually every subject under the sun. I could spend hours going over sources that people who are familiar with them have found materials presented in Scientology. Often verbatim or nearly verbatim.
Hubbard took hundreds of ideas and scraped off the serial numbers and repackaged them as part of his own ideas. I don't know if he ever had an original idea in his life.
Many cults use two to a half dozen hypnotic techniques, Scientology may have a couple thousand in it in hidden forms and it also thousands of neologisms, new terms to control the thinking of the members, as well as many thousands of contradictions to overwhelm and confuse the members, leaving them in a miasma of uncertainty, and creating an unreal and confused state of extreme dependence and heightened suggestibility.
That being said, I recall YouTube videos and articles by cult expert Margaret Singer remarking on numerous cults. She discovered food cults, exercise cults, hair care cults, a carpet cleaning cult, a horse care cult and many, many others.
I will include a few posts on my time in and journey out of Scientology to describe the strangeness of this cult.
"The public takes care of their fear by thinking only crazies and stupid people wind up in cults. I've interviewed over 4000 ex-cult members. There's no one type of person who is vulnerable."
Margaret Singer — The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1997, as cited in Margaret Thaler Singer, The Lancet, January 31, 2004
Cult experts from Margaret Singer to Robert Jay Lifton to Steve Hassan to Rick Alan Ross to Jon Atack to Alexandra Stein to Daniel Shaw have found that a cult can recruit any type of person.
Often Margaret Singer would have students who had studied several courses on psychology come into her course and ask what types of personality disorders predisposed people to join cults. They believed that the cult members were bipolar or psychopathic or sociopathic or narcissists before joining a cult.
She remarked on how shocked they were to discover that anyone from any background could be lied to by cult recruiters.
You or I MIGHT be aware that Scientology or the Moonies, as examples, are destructive cults that lie to, abuse, and exploit their members but that is no guarantee we will avoid a different group. Many people are aware that Scientology is a cult who are members of other cults.
The cult can be seen as an abusive relationship extended over a group.
What kind of person could be an abused child or partner? Any person. The abusive relationship and the vulnerability to abuse that we all have is the important thing. If the abuser has the traits of A human predator then the vulnerability to abuse is in the human nature of the victim, not some unusual or strange traits in the victim.
You can be aware that your neighbor is in an abusive relationship but deny it in your own home. That is a good way to explain this.
It has extensive evidence that in my opinion supports the hypothesis that we as humans generally overestimate our knowledge and understanding in subjects. This has been explored in other research such as the Dunning-Kruger effect, but most people who hear of that misinterpret it.
They believe the Dunning-Kruger effect means stupid people don't know they are stupid. That's not what the research shows.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is present in EVERYONE regardless of education or intelligence. Many intelligent or highly educated people assume they are immune to this, research has consistently shown that they ARE subject to it, just like everyone else.
We usually only can be highly educated in a few subjects and in those subjects we have limits, limits we can underestimate. In the subjects we are entirely uneducated in or slightly educated in we grossly underestimate our ignorance and lack of understanding. I can't emphasize that enough.
The book Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow has additional evidence and information on this topic.
The book the Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt further explores this and includes his important observation that the human mind has two aptitudes. It is a decent scientist, at times, sorting information to find facts and information that is true from observations and assumptions (we always have assumptions and emotions guiding our thoughts, if our minds are functioning) but the human mind is a superb lawyer, seeking ways to support what it wants to be true and to minimize, deny, or ignore what it does not want. Haidt explained that he realized when he had an argument with up his wife that he was cherry picking parts of the past, and leaving out others, and misrepresented the evidence to support his position.
He realized that his young son would ask “CAN something be true?” if he desired it but asked “MUST it be true?” if he didn't want it.
We all do that and look for any way what we desire to be true to possibly even slightly be supported, maybe, sort of, and look for every way that it isn't absolutely proven beyond all doubt for what we don't want to believe in.
That's the essential problem. We avoid inconvenient truths, and the authors of the Knowledge Illusion discovered that we can see our ignorance if we have to demonstrate HOW things work in the proper sequence, step by step if we have to write it down and then get shown the real way that something works, we can see our ignorance.
They also discovered that showing people their ignorance and proving it them results in the people becoming uncomfortable, feeling confused, and avoiding the people who showed them their ignorance in the future.
When shown our confidence is not justified we tend to dislike he feeling, avoid the people who showed us this unpleasant reality, and return to our more comfortable ignorance and bliss.
I have written extensively on these topics and books and will include a collection of links.
These are all good and extremely relevant questions.
I believe children and adults should be educated regarding cognitive biases and a number of related subjects to help us understand ourselves and others better. Cognitive biases and logical fallacies are an absolute must in my opinion for inclusion at multiple levels of education, starting with the earliest levels at which they can be understood to any significant degree and expanded on as one progresses.
For adults it is even more important because adults wield a far greater share of power in almost every level of human interaction and society. Adults are extraordinarily resistant to learning about cognitive biases because we are biased to assume that other people may have them while a person of “my” political beliefs, religious beliefs, personal character and behavior is perfectly rational and objective.
A number of biases including the fundamental attribution error, the in-group and out-group group of biases, and naive realism, as well as the bias blindspot leave us, well, blind to our own biases. The obstacles to instruction regarding cognitive biases are significant, but if we wish to be careful in our thinking, logical, and to seek truth over comfort, we have an obligation to address this issue.
I don't believe there is scientific evidence that ALL biases can be reduced but SOME may be and if we have groups focused on countering them we may find ways that groups can counter them to a degree or at least factor them into our thinking to some degree.
I think it's incorrect, for example, to believe one is not gullible because they have discovered that others are or even that they themselves were in the past, being capable of being lied to and believing the lie is an inescapable part of human nature.
Many biases are similar in nature and a part of our subconscious processes. That is not something we will have perfect conscious awareness or control of, certainly not as human beings.
I believe that adding information on cognitive biases and psychology and critical thinking and human predators to our education is crucial to helping is to strive to be more accurate n our thinking and aware of when we are inaccurate.
I have written extensively on critical thinking and will include some links to several articles on this.
I highly recommend the work of Richard Paul and Linda Elder as they developed a curriculum on critical thinking and have several superb YouTube videos available free as well as numerous books they have written.
One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.
Milgram (1963) examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders from their superiours.
The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:
Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974).
Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.
Milgram selected participants for his experiment by newspaper advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.
The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher.’ The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant).
The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).
Milgram's Experiment
Aim:
Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.
Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII.
Procedure:
Volunteers were recruited for a controlled experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics: deception). Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area. They were paid $4.50 for just turning up.
At the beginning of the experiment, they were introduced to another participant, who was a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram).
They drew straws to determine their roles – learner or teacher – although this was fixed and the confederate was always the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a gray lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram).
Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used - one for the learner (with an electric chair) and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator.
The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.
The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued.
There were four prods and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read out the next prod, and so on.
Prod 1: Please continue.
Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: You have no other choice but to continue.
Results:
65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.
Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study. All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).
Conclusion:
Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.
People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.
Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:
'The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations.
I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.
Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.
The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.'
Milgrams' Agency Theory
Milgram (1974) explained the behavior of his participants by suggesting that people have two states of behavior when they are in a social situation:
The autonomous state – people direct their own actions, and they take responsibility for the results of those actions.
The agentic state – people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders. In other words, they act as agents for another person’s will.
Milgram suggested that two things must be in place for a person to enter the agentic state:
The person giving the orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other people’s behavior. That is, they are seen as legitimate.
The person being ordered about is able to believe that the authority will accept responsibility for what happens.
Agency theory says that people will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is supported by some aspects of Milgram’s evidence.
For example, when participants were reminded that they had responsibility for their own actions, almost none of them were prepared to obey. In contrast, many participants who were refusing to go on did so if the experimenter said that he would take responsibility.
Milgram Experiment Variations
The Milgram experiment was carried out many times whereby Milgram (1965) varied the basic procedure (changed the IV). By doing this Milgram could identify which factors affected obedience (the DV).
Obedience was measured by how many participants shocked to the maximum 450 volts (65% in the original study). In total 636 participants have been tested in 18 different variation studies.
Uniform
In the original baseline study – the experimenter wore a gray lab coat as a symbol of his authority (a kind of uniform). Milgram carried out a variation in which the experimenter was called away because of a phone call right at the start of the procedure.
The role of the experimenter was then taken over by an ‘ordinary member of the public’ ( a confederate) in everyday clothes rather than a lab coat. The obedience level dropped to 20%.
Change of Location
The experiment was moved to a set of run down offices rather than the impressive Yale University. Obedience dropped to 47.5%. This suggests that status of location effects obedience.
Two Teacher Condition
When participants could instruct an assistant (confederate) to press the switches, 92.5% shocked to the maximum 450 volts. When there is less personal responsibility obedience increases. This relates to Milgram's Agency Theory.
Touch Proximity Condition
The teacher had to force the learner's hand down onto a shock plate when they refuse to participate after 150 volts. Obedience fell to 30%.
The participant is no longer buffered / protected from seeing the consequences of their actions.
Social Support Condition
Two other participants (confederates) were also teachers but refused to obey. Confederate 1 stopped at 150 volts, and confederate 2 stopped at 210 volts.
The presence of others who are seen to disobey the authority figure reduces the level of obedience to 10%.
Absent Experimenter Condition
It is easier to resist the orders from an authority figure if they are not close by. When the experimenter instructed and prompted the teacher by telephone from another room, obedience fell to 20.5%.
Many participants cheated and missed out shocks or gave less voltage than ordered to by the experimenter. The proximity of authority figure affects obedience.
Critical Evaluation
The Milgram studies were conducted in laboratory type conditions, and we must ask if this tells us much about real-life situations. We obey in a variety of real-life situations that are far more subtle than instructions to give people electric shocks, and it would be interesting to see what factors operate in everyday obedience. The sort of situation Milgram investigated would be more suited to a military context.
Orne and Holland (1968) accused Milgram’s study of lacking ‘experimental realism,'’ i.e.,' participants might not have believed the experimental set-up they found themselves in and knew the learner wasn’t receiving electric shocks.
“It’s more truthful to say that only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real, and of those two-thirds disobeyed the experimenter,” observes Perry (p. 139).
Milgram's sample was biased:
The participants in Milgram's study were all male. Do the findings transfer to females?
Milgram’s study cannot be seen as representative of the American population as his sample was self-selected. This is because they became participants only by electing to respond to a newspaper advertisement (selecting themselves). They may also have a typical "volunteer personality" – not all the newspaper readers responded so perhaps it takes this personality type to do so.
Yet a total of 636 participants were tested in 18 separate experiments across the New Haven area, which was seen as being reasonably representative of a typical American town.
Milgram’s findings have been replicated in a variety of cultures and most lead to the same conclusions as Milgram’s original study and in some cases see higher obedience rates.
However, Smith and Bond (1998) point out that with the exception of Jordan (Shanab & Yahya, 1978), the majority of these studies have been conducted in industrialized Western cultures and we should be cautious before we conclude that a universal trait of social behavior has been identified.
Ethical Issues
Deception – the participants actually believed they were shocking a real person and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram's.
However, Milgram argued that “illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths.”
Milgram also interviewed participants afterward to find out the effect of the deception. Apparently, 83.7% said that they were “glad to be in the experiment,” and 1.3% said that they wished they had not been involved.
Protection of participants - Participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. Many of the participants were visibly distressed.
Signs of tension included trembling, sweating, stuttering, laughing nervously, biting lips and digging fingernails into palms of hands. Three participants had uncontrollable seizures, and many pleaded to be allowed to stop the experiment. Milgram described a businessman reduced to a “twitching stuttering wreck” (1963, p. 377),
In his defense, Milgram argued that these effects were only short-term. Once the participants were debriefed (and could see the confederate was OK) their stress levels decreased. Milgram also interviewed the participants one year after the event and concluded that most were happy that they had taken part.
However, Milgram did debrief the participants fully after the experiment and also followed up after a period of time to ensure that they came to no harm.
Milgram debriefed all his participants straight after the experiment and disclosed the true nature of the experiment. Participants were assured that their behavior was common and Milgram also followed the sample up a year later and found that there were no signs of any long-term psychological harm. In fact, the majority of the participants (83.7%) said that they were pleased that they had participated.
Right to Withdrawal - The BPS states that researchers should make it plain to participants that they are free to withdraw at any time (regardless of payment).
Did Milgram give participants an opportunity to withdraw? The experimenter gave four verbal prods which mostly discouraged withdrawal from the experiment:
Please continue.
The experiment requires that you continue.
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
You have no other choice, you must go on.
Milgram argued that they are justified as the study was about obedience so orders were necessary. Milgram pointed out that although the right to withdraw was made partially difficult, it was possible as 35% of participants had chosen to withdraw.
Milgram (1963) Audio Clips
Below you can also hear some of the audio clips taken from the video that was made of the experiment. Just click on the clips below.
You will be asked to decide if you want to open the files from their current location or save them to disk. Choose to open them from their current location. Then press play and sit back and listen!
Clip 1: This is a long audio clip of the 3rd participant administering shocks to the confederate. You can hear the confederate's pleas to be released and the experimenter's instructions to continue.
Clip 2: A short clip of the confederate refusing to continue with the experiment.
Clip 3: The confederate begins to complain of heart trouble.
Clip 4: Listen to the confederate get a shock: "Let me out of here. Let me out, let me out, let me out" And so on!
Clip 5: The experimenter tells the participant that they must continue.
